I wasn't expecting this to be so hard. I ordered an RK3588 based Orange Pi 5+ a while back as a development platform. It's great. A good combination CPU and GPU power. As well as a very competitive price to performance ratio. I also bought a large heat sink for it. However it kept hitting thermal limit under heavy use. Yet, I wasn't able to find a 5V fan that would fit on top of the heat sink. Even more so, I can't find any documentation about the GPIO pins.
Official product page of the Orange Pi 5+
Today, I accidentally found a 5V fan for the Raspberry Pi in a local electronics store, for cheap (about 1.3 USD). I bought it immidiately. and got back home to try it out. I tried Googling for figure out the orientation of the GPIO pins and locate where the 5V pin is. I just can't get it working. Until I found the following image on Google. Then some more luck finding a high resolution version of it on Taobao.
GPIO pinout of the Orange Pi 5+
Somehow this is shown on an Amazon page for the Orange Pi 5+. But I can't find a high resolution version of it after following the link. Anyway, this is what I need. I connected the fan to the 5V and GND pins. And it works! Now the CPU temperature is only 50 degrees Celsius under coninuous heavy load.
The finished assembly, My fan is stuck to the heat sink with foam tape
In case anyone needs a close up shot for connecting a fan to the Orange Pi 5+, here it is:
Running `stress -c 8` for 10 minutes, the CPU temperature is ~50 degrees Celsius while ambient temperature is ~26 degrees Celsius. I'm very happy with this result.
The only complain I have is that the fan is a bit noisy and does not turn off when the board is powered off. I can solve it by doing a bit of wiring, connecting the fan to 3.3V instead. And add a switch to turn it on and off. But for now, it's good enough.
